Grace and Poison
Poetry and essay
Turnstone Press, 2001
196 pages
Grace and Poison is a collector’s edition of two of Connelly’s early poetry collections, The Small Words In My Body and The Disorder of Love.
The long introductory essay of this book explores the connections between poetry and the learning of languages, between love for the earth and love of the body. Discussing the content of her own early work, Connelly traces her journey from Canada to Asia to Greece, and finally, to a profound sense of home within a dislocated world of migrants.
“To be split, as I feel split, between cultures, languages, countries, loyalties, is to nurse a curious, long-term fracture. It does not leave you, cannot, because it has become you. All of us are fragmented in more or less perceptible ways; many people have more than one language, one home, one allegiance, one truth. As confusing as that fragmentation and multiplicity can be, they also offer us a new way to understand our world and to approach the work of being engaged human beings. Though the poet healed herself by discovering a home in Greece, the disorder of love is not so neatly unravelled. By its very nature, it never will be. Slowly, wherever I live, I learn to find a peace within the complexity of what I am, what I was, what I’m becoming.”
REVIEWS
“. . Experiences, landscapes and intimacies have been rendered in exhilarating, sensuous movement with language so lush, voices so vibrant, and rhythms so resonant that the poems often seem to read, even perform, themselves. . . Connelly has wrought searing poetry.”
- Canadian Literature, Spring 1997
“Connelly is a young writer . . . but the originality and formality of her poems suggest a maturity beyond her years. These are carefully crafted works, constructed with exact detail and acumen. . . . At the heart of Connelly’s book lies an investigation into language as the essential tool of the poet, and in Part One, the word is made flesh. Language is not only tactile but visceral: thoughts, emotions, and the abstract are embodied in skin and blood, bone and sinew . . . What Connelly says about the Chinese language of her friend Junwei Qi, “the tongue is wind-touched/the words . . . danced from the lips”, is equally true of her own poems.”
- Quarry Literary Review, 1992
“Her main strength as a poet lies in her acute sensitivity to people . . . Harrowing images . . . abound in the collection and give it a tangy vigour. Connelly’s most poignant verses, though, deal with the death of her sister. . . In successive poems, the body goes from perfection to rot to bare bones, and “ribs, played by wind, whistle high silver songs.” . . . In a thoroughly modern, personal way, Connelly has described the wheel of life, death, and rebirth . . .”
- Dandelion Literary Review